Yellen acknowledged the economy still faced a number of challenges on
job creation, long term unemployment, a shrinking labor force, but she
insisted that there have been improvements in the economic numbers.
Really?

Fed economists have slightly lowered their forecasts for economic
growth to a sub-par 2.8 percent to 3 percent this year -- forecasts that
have often been far too optimistic in previous years.

They were also predicting that the jobless rate will fall much
faster than currently forecast, dropping to 6.1 to 6.3 percent this year,
and down into the 5 percent range in 2015. That seems unlikely in the
absence of any tax cut incentives.

Someone asked Yellen at her press conference why the recovery has
taken so long, but she dodged the question with the well-worn White House
excuse that the recession was much deeper than expected.

Actually, in many ways, President Reagan encountered a much deeper
recession in 1981-82, with unemployment reaching nearly 11 percent. But
the economy came roaring back in two years, the average length for most
recessions, as a result of his across-the-board tax cuts.

Six years into this recession, economic growth remains weak,
slipping to 1.9 percent in 2013 -- amid signs of yet another slow start
this year, too.

Job growth has been terrible, nowhere near where we should be at
this juncture if the right policies had been put in place. In September,
1983, Reagan's economy created over one million jobs in a single month.

"The [Obama] economy created 113,000 jobs in January, up from
75,000 in December," says economist Peter Morici of the University of
Maryland's School of Business.

"Colder than normal weather was a factor but that simply does not
explain two consecutive months of poor performance. These sad results are
consistent with a broadly underperforming economy," he says.

Job growth crept up a little in February, coming in at 175,000 jobs,
but that was nowhere near the monthly jobs needed to put American back to
work.

The New York Times said the 175,000 figure "was still well short of
the pace needed to return the economy to full employment anytime soon or
to quickly reduce the ranks of the long-term unemployed."

There was little or nothing in Yellen's analysis before the
Washington press corps Wednesday that in any way acknowledged this.
And the Fed provided no evidence to support its rosy forecasts of a
plummeting jobless rate.

That is, unless the Fed is hoping that many more people will be
dropping out of the labor force because they can't find work and quit
looking, and thus are no longer defined as unemployed.

In January, the White House bragged about the jobless rate falling
to 6.6 percent, but that was "largely because 91,000 additional
working-age adults chose not to seek employment," Morici says. "[O]ne out
of every six adult men is jobless and likely to stay that way," he added.

If you factor in the adults on the sidelines who say they would be
seeking work if the job market improved, and part-timers who need full
time employment, the jobless rate would be 12.7 percent, he says.

The Gallup Poll puts the real unemployment rate at 7.2 percent and
the underemployed at 16.5 percent, with 41 percent of the respondents
saying they're "struggling" and 4 percent saying they're "suffering."

These Americans were nowhere to be seen in the Fed's exaggerated
forecasts this week.